I’m not sure how your opinion qualifies as a “consensus”, but perhaps you’d be kind enough to elaborate on just what it is that makes podcasting “lame”?

I’m glad. I wanted to start a conversation about this, not be the bell of gloom and doom. I think that you are right, that many do podcast for the hell of it, and I’m looking forward to listening to more of them. I just have the feeling that we’re in a dip between waves of popularity, and a new wave will be coming in the next year.

Who would want to have their podcatcher download files, then have to import them into iTunes, then copy them to their iPod

Me. I hate the way iTunes handles podcatching. It’s useless for me. I don’t just listen to them on my iPod, or in iTunes, or from a single computer. I listen to them from multiple devices on my home network, or my iPod. Each has their own quirks, but using iTunes seems to ensure that I have extra work to do for everything (including iTunes).

I just wrote my own tool that does some tag fixup, sets the genre to Podcast, imports into iTunes, and sets bookmarkable and skip during shuffle.

I agree and disagree with you. I would definitely call this a downturn, or to put it a different way, more like the trough between waves. The first wave has definitely crested, and we are sliding down the opposite side into the trough, but the next wave is definitely coming in. So people shouldn’t be discouraged to jump in now.

Having gone through the initial .com bubble, and it’s bursting, and then getting in on the next wave, I definitely see this happening with podcasting. Given how shotgun random the .com bubble was in the first place, and how much more thought out this current expansion (wave) has been with all the cool stuff that is coming out; I am eagerly awaiting the next wave of podcasting. I don’t know what is coming, but I am sure it will be even better than the first wave most of us rode.

So the Golden Age will never really end, because the talent pool is bottomless. If some of the Class of 2004 fade away in 2007… well, to be brutally honest, they won’t even be a memory to the Class of 2014… and that’s okay.

As for the Gold Rush Age… well, almost no one makes a living from podcasting, and never has. There’s no Gold in that RSS stream… it’s on the banks, in consulting, production, voice work, lectures, and goods and services a podcast promotes.

The network builders might find success if they carve a niche, stick with it, and have a talent for herding cats. Even then, it can argued that people who run networks are in the business of selling advertising, not podcasting.

Regarding podcast clients… only about half of the audience uses iTunes. What’s everyone else using? Considering that about half of listeners don’t even use a portable media player, perhaps they’re using an embedded player like PodPress, or a platform independent application like myPodder, which comes pre-loaded and ready to go on some devices.

I guess my feeling is that this medium is like the old saw about a river… it’s always there, cutting through the terrain, but it’s a different river every time you step into its waters. Still fresh, still beautiful, still a powerful influence on the surroundings… but always changing.